Turn Your Old iPhone Into A Wireless Music System

Attention, Mac people who just bought or are about to receive a new iPhone. If your old iPhone is still fairly new, you don't have any kids yammering for an iPod Touch and you have no other reason to keep it, you should probably sell it.

If your old iPhone is old and busted, like mine, you probably won't get much for it. Here's a better idea: Turn that old iPhone into a wireless music receiver for $US3, and plug it into a stereo or powered speakers in your house. Presto: wireless music from any source.

You can set it up in a couple of minutes, and then boom — all the audio from your Mac will come out of your old iPhone. Plug that thing into some powered speakers, a home entertainment centre, or an old stereo system, and you have an inexpensive wireless audio system that can play anything — iTunes, Spotify, Windows Media Player, Rdio, Pandora, or any other music source your Mac can handle. We've been testing it, and it works just fine.

First, you'll need to charge up the old iPhone, at least a little bit. If it's working, good — simply install WiFi2HiFi on your iPhone and the station software on your Mac.

Only do this part if your old iPhone can't get on WiFi: If you had to move your SIM card from your old phone to your new phone, you might have to follow Apple's instructions to get the old one up and running again (basically, inserting the SIM card, firing up the phone and then removing the SIM card and putting it back in your new phone).

Pros

It works anywhere you have WiFi. (We tested it with iTunes, on-demand music services, and streaming radio services.)

It costs $2.99. That's a lot for an app, and not a lot for a receiver.

You can control volume with a nice dial on the old iPhone, and use Play/Pause, Skip, and Back controls with iTunes (volume works with all other apps).

Handy control in the Mac Menu Bar:

Cons

Mac-only. Earlier versions worked with Windows Vista and Windows 7. Developer Tobias Gemperli told Evolver.fm by email, "Windows is more complicated to support than MAC. There are a lot of different sound cards and special cases. Therefore we have started with MAC only.

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